Cosmetics have been used since early times to beautify the skin and hair. The manufacture of cosmetics is a 20th century development under the influence of Hollywood in the 1920's coupled with the development of mass production and mass marketing techniques. As a consequence, cosmetics were offered to the public at relatively low prices. As one can ascertain, the cosmetic industry today is huge, and there are a tremendous number of products utilized.
As is well known, a very important aspect of the entire cosmetic industry is the preparation and distribution of various cosmetic products which contain color. For example, various lipsticks, powders, eye make-ups, and so on are available in a wide variety of colors.
As one can further ascertain, it is extremely difficult to accurately represent such colors in advertisements or elsewhere. Such colors, as available in a complete line of lipsticks or other lines of cosmetics products, had to be portrayed by various means to show all the various available colors. These means involve photographic or other techniques which attempted to show the different colors by charts, in order to inform the consumer of the available colors of the respective products.
Face powders, lipsticks, and nail polishes are examples of cosmetic products which contain coloring materials of various kinds. As one can ascertain, the color of cosmetics, especially in regard to lipsticks and nail polishes, is extremely important, and there are a wide variety of colors and shades employed. Due to the wide variety of colors, the display of such colors has been extremely difficult. In order to determine color, one would ordinarily refer to a color chart.
Coloring materials, for example, which are employed with face powders are either natural ground earth colors or certified organic colors. The fact that color is considered the primary factor in cosmetic products such as lipsticks and face powders is well known. Thus, the art of providing colors and the utilization of various pigments and various substances is an extremely important art, and many companies have proprietary color formulations which have been developed extensively.
It is difficult and expensive to accurately display the color of the product on various containers and so on by using conventional techniques. In this regard, each and every container would have to have either a photograph or some kind of color coordinated area which shows the color of the cosmetic product included within the container. This color can, of course, vary from batch to batch and may vary widely depending upon the blending process and so on. Hence, a prior art display of color is not accurate, due to the many factors which can effect the color presented on the display as compared to the color presented on the product.
The need for exact-likeness display facsimiles has, for the most part, consistently grown with the demands for such articles by an ever-increasingly health conscious society. For instance, community-type cosmetic product samplers can promote the spread of germs, and therefore, they present a contamination problem which makes their continued use by the public less desirable.